this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

But... I wanna play Fortnite.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago

i never saw one to begin with

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (6 children)

My daughter wants to play Sims 3 and use her Zune. I'm sure it's possible to do both with enough work and time spent tracking down old utilities but how much time do I want to spend on that when I could just crank out a VM.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Why is this thread getting flooded with people saying how they can't use Linux? Isn't that a little odd coming from a Linux community?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Because on lemmy a post getting 100 up votes is enough to end up somewhere high on all, so your seeing people from outside of the Linux community in here.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

That's why I'm here, front page.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Hiya, intending to switch from Windows to Linux (it looks like I'll finally be pulling the proverbial trigger this holiday season!) but I got here via Local sorted by Active on programming.dev. I am not subbed to Linux.

In other words, people outside the target audience are getting exposed to this post.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Because people are mad any time someone suggests they could change anything about themselves. It's pretty sad.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 day ago (62 children)

Okay, look, I don't want to be a hater, I promise. I have a setup with a Linux dual boot in my computer right now. But man, the crazy echo chamber around this issue is not just delusional, it's counterproductive. Being in denial about the shortcomings isn't particularly helpful in expanding reach, if that's what you all say you want.

So, in the spirit of balance, my mostly unbiased take on the listicle:

1 - Web tools get the job done: This is true when it's true. I work with Google's office suite, so yeah, many tools are indistinguishable. But not all tools are web tools. A big fallacy in this article is that just because a subset of items have embraced a solution doesn't mean that the solution is universal. If you need to work with Adobe software you're still SOL. MS Office still lacks some features on the web app. Some of the tools I use don't work, so I do still need to run those in a native Windows app. Since I'm not going to switch OSs every time I need to push a particular button, I'm going to default to Windows for work.

2 - Plenty of distros to suit your preference: This one is an active downside, and it pisses me off when it gets parroted. When I last decided to dual boot Linux I had to try five different distros to find one that sort of did everything I needed at once, which was a massive waste of time. I'm talking multiple days. Yes, there are a ton of distros. I only need to use one, though. But I need that one to work all the time. If one of the distros can get my HDR monitor to work but not my 5.1 audio and another can get my 5.1 audio setup to work, but not my monitors, then both distros are broken and neither is useful to me. This actually happened, incidentally.

3 - Steam has a decent collection of Linux games, plus Steam OS: Yes. Gaming on Linux is possible and works alright, but it's far from perfect. Features my Nvidia card runs reliably on Windows are hit-and-miss under Linux. Not all games are compatible in the first place, either. And while Heroic does a great job of running my GOG and Epic libraries, which are themselves just as big as my Steam one, it is a much bigger hassle to set up to run under the SteamOS game mode UI. Don't get me wrong, this has made huge strides but again, I'm not going to change OSs every time I hit a compatibility snag. This is the least fallacious of these points, though.

4 - Proprietary choices on Linux: Yes, there are some. Like the web app thing, the problem isn't what is there, it's what's missing. Also, as a side note, I find it extremely obnoxious when you have to enable these manually as an option in your package manager. As a user I don't care if a package is open source or not, I just want to install it.

5 - Electron makes app availability easier. Cool. Will take your word for it. Acknowledging the ideological debate behind it goes to the same argument I made in the previous point. And as above, it's not about what's there, it's about what's missing.

6 - No ads in your OS. I mean... nice? I still get ads for my selected distro on first boot, as well as on web apps and notifications for installed apps. Beyond a few direct links to first party apps in the one page of Win 11's settings app I don't find anything in Windows particularly intrusive, either. Which is not to say I don't dislike some of the overly commercial choices in Windows, they're just not a dealbreaker... yet.

7 - Docker, Homelab and self-hosting: This is... off topic, honestly. I do self host some things. Even used Docker once or twice... in my NAS, where the self-hosting happens. You don't need to switch your home desktop to Linux for that, and nobody is questioning that Linux is the OS of choice for a whole host of device ranges, from servers to the Raspberry Pi. Linux is great as a customizable underlying framework to build fast support for a niche device with a range of specific applications. We should be honest about how that breaks down if you try to use it as a widely accessible home computer alternative where the priorities are wide compatibility and ease of use.

Well, that became a huge thing, but... yeah, I guess I was annoyed enough by the delusion to rant. Look, I'd love to step away from Windows, and it's a thing you can do if you're tech savvy and willing to pretzel around the limitations in your hardware choices and your willingness to tinker... but it's not a serious mainstream alternative by a wide margin. I wish it was. Self-congratulatory praise within the tiny bubble of pre-existing fans (and why are there fans of operating systems in the first place?) is not going to help improve or widen its reach.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

Have used Linux for decades. Switched over full time a few months ago and have generally been happy but all your points are extremely valid.

Plasma will occasionally freeze the taskbar/desktop when it wakes up or I switch back to my desktop from work laptop using a KVM, effectively connecting a monitor.

For me that's fine, manually open a terminal and kill the process so it'll restart. For all but a handful of my extended friends and family that means the computer is broken until you log off or restart. It's not a smooth experience.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (5 children)

why are there fans of operating systems in the first place

Operating systems are huge endeavours of engineering and design by entire teams of people over decades, which are used literally daily. Is that not enough of a reason for people to be fans of them?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Regarding Office, fear not! Microsoft is working hard to remove functionality from the Windows and Mac desktop apps, so soon we'll have feature parity! See: "New Outlook".

They've been pushing this shit for years already, nobody wants it, and they're forcing it next year despite still not fixing shared calendars (among other things). New Outlook is basically just the web app in a wrapper.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The only reason I have a windows laptop at home is because my employer forces me to. It's true that Adobe and MS stuff doesn't run or runs bad, same with some specific live service games. Personally I hate all of those and am more than happy to avoid em like the plague outside of work hours. They're horrible inadequate tools and horrible predatory games. Everything I actually wanted personally, has so far run just fine for years.

Edit: Remembered one specific thing that does really suck on Linux, and that's music production. That area is absolutely cluttered with proprietary shit. Even switching between windows and macos is a pain as many of the tools are just not compatible.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Anymore"? I haven't ever owned a Windows machine, and I haven't used a Windows machine since 2015. I do have to fix a random issue on my wife's work laptop about once a month.

I get that there are some things some people can't do without and which keeps them in Windows: games, and requirements of their business (Word, Excel, PPT), but nothing about Linux has gotten significantly better in recent years. Incrementally, over there past decade, sure, but no big, recent change that might justify the title.

Except in the same way I've never needed Windows: in a very specific, individual way.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Coming from someone who just migrated myself and my family within the last year. Flatpaks were a big deal. I get people have their criticisms of it but wow, installing and updating apps is so much easier now compared to when I tried linux last and flatpak is probably the main reason why we are still on Linux today.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As a person who was all in on the AppImage distribution system (vs Flatpaks), I'm both sad and excited to see how well Flatpaks seem to be working out.

I guess they won that little competition in the end - which seems good, as there's now a healthy standard we can focus on.

It's genuinely great to now have widely accepted distribution independent packaging standards.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

I'm glad Flatpack appears to be winning over the utterly horrible Snap, but I still don't like it. I fear a day when it becomes difficult to get software that isn't packaged in Flatpack, and I have good reason to: Ruby Gems. Long ago, I was big into Ruby, and was a major contributor (I authored one of the core standard libraries). Gems came along, and I hated them; eventually, for unrelated reasons, I stopped using Ruby altogether, and now when I encounter it, it's impossible to use anything that doesn't have Gem woven into it. Consequently, AFAIK, my current system has nothing Ruby installed on it - unless my OS package manager is doing it under the hood.

IMHO, Flatpacks are a really poor work-around for people supporting and using programming languages that don't build software correctly. Rust and Go do it right: they build stand-alone executables. Flatpack adds literally no value to software built with these. They're not the only languages that do this, but they're the ones having their moment; any language that builds stand-alone, statically linked binaries would do.

I'm with you about AppImage; it would have been a better solution. Any packaging solution requiring extra software to be installed and a service to use is a bad design. I'd be objecting less if AppImage were emerging as the winner.

Incidentally, this is why Podman is superior to Docker: yes, you still need extra software to be installed, but there's no system service with crazy, root-level permissions required to run containers with podman.

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